Convergence Flagship Event

The conversations crypto needs to have in 2025 –– not the ones it wants to have.

BUENOS AIRES, ARG.
AREATRES

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 21ST
10:00 AM - 3:30 PM

Panels Speakers Venue Register →

Launching at DevConnect Buenos Aires 2025, marking OpenZeppelin's 10th anniversary. 21 industry leaders examining where security, privacy, institutional adoption, and interoperability converge.

The thesis

The biggest challenges in blockchain infrastructure don't exist in isolation. We're examining where critical areas intersect and depend on each other, not hosting four separate panels on disconnected topics:

–– Institutions need privacy to access onchain liquidity
–– Privacy only works with strong security foundations
–– Interoperability expands both liquidity and attach surfaces
–– Open standards ensure alignment and composability

What to expect

Industry leaders who are actually building the open standards infrastructure will tackle hard questions with honest answers.

–– No platitudes, no "we're early" deflections
–– Real blockers and practical timelines
–– What genuinely needs to happen

Five Critical Conversations

Time

Agenda

Speakers

10:00 AM

Registration & Breakfast

10:40 AM

Opening Remarks

Demian Brener

Founder & CEO at OpenZeppelin

10:50 AM

Why Protocols Still Get Hacked in 2025: Is 100% Security Even Possible?

Despite a decade of security tooling, audits, and best practices, protocols continue to lose billions to exploits. This panel examines the uncomfortable truths about blockchain security, and explores whether "unhackable" crypto is actually possible, or if we need to fundamentally rethink our approach and design for inevitable failure.

Eric Zhong

Protocol Engineer at Uniswap Labs

Patrick Collins

Co-Founder & CEO at Cyfrin

Eloi Manuel

Head of Security at Consensys (Linea)

Matta

Security Knowmad at The Red Guild & SEAL

Jota Carpanelli

Head of Security Research at OpenZeppelin (Moderator)

11:30 AM

Why Are We Still Talking About Crosschain Interoperability in 2025?

We are talking about interoperability and how to achieve seamless UX since the inception of Ethereum, and even before. Yet in 2025, we still have fragmented liquidity, sub-optimal UX, and all the issues that come from those. This panel confronts the uncomfortable question: why hasn't crosschain been solved yet? With new standards like the Open Intents Framework, ERC-7786, and more, we examine if things are actually different this time - and whether interop is even the right problem to solve.

Hart Lambur

Co-Founder at Across Protocol

Lorenzo Sicilia

Head of Technology at the Arbitrum Foundation

Josh Rudolf

Product at the Ethereum Foundation

Charles Lu

Co-Founder at Espresso Systems

Ernesto García

Lead Solidity Developer at OpenZeppelin (Moderator)

12:15 PM

Open Source Isn't Optional: Why Crypto's Future Depends on Public Goods

From Ethereum's origins to its 10th year anniversary, open source has been foundational to blockchain’s credibility, security, and permissionless innovation. But today, venture capital, competitive pressure, and sustainability challenges are pushing projects toward closed systems. In this conversation, Vitalik Buterin and Demian Brener explore why crypto must remain radically open or risk becoming the centralized systems it was built to replace - and how we fund public goods without compromising core principles.

Vitalik Buterin

Co-Founder of Ethereum

Demian Brener

Founder & CEO at OpenZeppelin

12:45 PM

Lunch & Networking

01:20 PM

Institutional Adoption: 2025, 2027, or 2030?

Everyone agrees institutional adoption is coming - but when? And what needs to happen between now and then? This panel brings together the teams enabling TradFi to move onchain - from stablecoin infrastructure to payment rails to enterprise platforms. No more "institutions are coming" platitudes. Honest timelines, real blockers, and what actually needs to be built or fixed for institutions to move meaningful volume onchain.

Anthony Kelani

Director, Ecosystem Growth & Strategy at Circle

Ash Nathan

Head of Strategic Projects at Chainlink Labs

Tomer Weller

Chief Product Officer at the Stellar Development Foundation

Amine Lahrichi

Head of Financial Institutions at OpenZeppelin (Moderator)

02:00 PM

The Privacy Wars: FHE, ZK, MPC, TEEs — Who Wins or Do We Need Them All?

Public blockchains are transparent by default, but mainstream adoption demands privacy. From confidential payroll to compliant B2B payments, from private DeFi to encrypted healthcare records - the use cases are clear. But the technology landscape is fragmented: Fully Homomorphic Encryption, Zero-Knowledge Proofs, Multi-Party Computation, and Trusted Execution Environments each promise solutions. This panel maps privacy primitives to real-world applications and asks the fundamental question: what's the actual endgame for blockchain privacy?

Clément Danjou

Head of Blockchain at Zama

Dominik Schmid

Founder at Miden

Researcher at the Ethereum Foundation PSE

Rahul Kothari

Head of New Projects at Aztec

Jonathan Alexander

CTO at OpenZeppelin (Moderator)

02:50 PM